MacBook :: Installing Windows With BootCamp From Thumb Drive

May 18, 2009

I have an Aluminum MacBook, is it possible to install Windows with boot camp from a thumb drive? I have access to the ISOs I need (from MSDNAA), but I ran out of CDR/DVDRs. Ideally I would extract the ISO onto the thumb drive and have it behave the same as if it was a CD, is it that simple or is there something else I will need to do?

perhaps I am doing something wrong? I wanted to install Windows XP on my iMac. I previously had partitioned my Mac drives. I backed everything on these drives to my external and blew the partitions away creating my one Mac drive again.

I then ran Bootcamp, created a partition and installed XP. Everything was fine. I then partitioned my main drive and got the warning message about Bootcamp maybe not working afterwards. So I finished partitioning my Mac drive as I wanted and now I don't have the option of booting into XP through Bootcamp. When I try it just shows the Mac drive as my only boot option. I see the XP Bootcamp drive in the System Preferences startup disk area, but I assume I did something to the partition once I partitioned my Mac drives

I'm trying to install ubuntu from a thumb drive. Basically, I'm converting the .iso to an .img, and restore the thumb drive from the .img, trying to make it bootable. I'm following the procedure form the ubuntu website. Drag and Drop a file from Finder to Terminal to 'paste' the full path without typing and risking type errors.

Download the desired fileOpen the Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities/ or query Terminal in Spotlight)Convert the .iso file to .img using the convert option of hdiutil (e.g., hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/target.img ~/path/to/ubuntu.iso)Note: OS X tends to put the .dmg ending on the output file automatically.Run diskutil list to get the current list of devicesInsert your flash mediaRun diskutil list again and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN (replace N with the disk number from the last command; in the previous example, N would be 2)Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m (replace /path/to/downloaded.img with the path where the image file is located; for example, ./ubuntu.img or ./ubuntu.dmg).Using /dev/rdisk instead of /dev/disk may be faster.If you see the error dd: Invalid number '1m', you are using GNU dd. Use the same command but replace bs=1m with bs=1M.If you see the error dd: /dev/diskN: Resource busy, make sure the disk is not in use. Start the 'Disk Utility.app' and unmount (don't eject) the drive.Run diskutil eject/dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completesRestart your Mac and press alt while the Mac is restarting to choose the USB-Stick

Everything goes through fine, except, when I restart my mac to see the boot options. All I see is Macintosh HD

I got this weird issue with my 4 GB flash/thumb drive. Basically, in OS X it seems to work perfectly fine. I formatted it to HFS+ and transferred files to it, ejected it, then put it back in, the file is still there, I transferred it back to the computer, and it opens fine. However, when I put it in any machine running Windows, it'll only recognize 48 MB or something. It refuses to format the whole 4 GB.

When I plug it into an Ubuntu machine, it would recognize a "4 GB filesystem", but would throw up errors anytime I try to interact with it. And when I tried to format it with Ubuntu, it would invariably fail. From Windows and Ubuntu's views, the flash drive is no good. But then why does it *seem* to work fine in OS X? Yes, I have formatted the drive with MS-DOS (FAT) in OS X, same results in Windows and Ubuntu.

im having trouble installing bootcamp and drivers on vista for my macbook. i installed vista without problems but when i put my leopard disc in it doesnt not run the bootcamp installer instead it goes into a macbook air installer and asks for me to connect to a macbook air. what is wrong? i have done it before so i dont know why i cant do it now. should i do everything all over again?

I got the Windows RC1. I installed it perfectly with bootcamp on my macbook pro, no problems, no issues. On that install I partitioned the one and only drive in the notebook. I then went to install it on my Desktop mac pro. I wanted to allocate a complete drive to it, so I dropped in a WD blue in the 3rd bay. Formatted it, I tried both ways. Partitioning & dedicating the entire drive to windows 7. Neither worked. It started the install everything seemed normal until you get to the prompt screen to format the boot camp disk.

I have recently picked up a very inexpensive 1gig thumb drive (yes, they are practically giving them away anymore). It came with some proprietary software for downloading and installing apps, but it only functions on a PC. I'm looking for suggestions on apps that people may use or have used on thumb drives that can be very useful in day to day life, and I'm working off of several OS's. (Mac OSX, Windows XP, and Ubuntu Dapper Drake.) I was also thinking about installing DSL on the thumb drive.

I saw this on the internet and I was wondering if anyone has been able to do that here. I would love to hear your experience with the procedure. Here is the link that I ran into. Really interesting [URL]

I just downloaded the RC of Windows 7 (64-bit) and am trying to install it on my 2 month old macbook pro. This is my first mac, so i'm still getting used to it. I have created a dvd with the w7 iso image on it, created a 20gb partition using bootcamp, and now at the step of installing w7 on that new partition. The problem i'm running into is when trying to install, it says the partition needs to be formatted as NTFS. After backtracking and not seeing an option to make this new partition in NTFS format, i'm at a dead end. What can I do now?

I use SL Bootcamp Assistance and installed Windows 7 RTM on my Mac mini, but after installation no Bootcamp in Windows.

My Mac Mini use an Apple mouse but a wireless PC keyboard.

My questions are:

1. Anyway to get the Bootcamp back so I can choose to boot in Mac OS X?

2. With the PC keyboard, how to "option-key" so I can select the boot device while power on?

BTW I purchased my Mac Mini in April 2009 and did a brand new install of SL. I noticed when used Bootcamp Assistance it said my machine cannot support x64, but I followed a post in this forum to "force run" BootCampx64 under /Bootcamp/Drivers/Apple of the SL DVD. Is it the reason why Bootcamp isgone?

The only copy of windows XP i have is pre SP2. I tried to install this last night via boot camp, but after spending hours installing and loading the drivers from the mac disc, not all were installed. Then I was hardwired to my router to run windows update to get SP2/SP3 I could not for the life of me get the 3 drivers to install.

realised that my previous post was in the wrong section, (sorry!) so i decided to re-post it in the correct place.

Ok, so i setup bootcamp and installed windows xp. installed the bootcamp drivers, and things worked fine for a couple of days.... than the bootcamp appeared to get corrupted. fn keys cant work, xp cant detect mac partition (cant access any files in there, though the reverse works), no bootcamp icon in system try. someone mentioned to search for the KbdMgr.exe or bootcamp and start the program, but i cant find both items.

re-installation of bootcamp with the cd doesnt seem to work for me. either the system restarts before installation is completed, or xp crashes during the installation process. EDIT: now all i get is xp crashing before installation is complete

downloaded the bootcamp 2.1 but absolutely nothing happens when i click on the exe file!

there are a bunch of apple drivers shown in the add/remove programs, but they dont seem to be working (tried to remove them all and re-install, but xp crashed halfway and i had to use the cd to repair it). seems to me all that the drivers are 'there' already, but not working.

short of completely starting over from scratch and re-installing the entire windows, is there anything else i can try?

I just purchased my new Mac 2 days ago, Its a Macbook pro 2.53ghz model. I'm a big gamer so I want to instal Winxp to play games like fallout 3, crysis, cod 5 etc. How much space should I create for my windows partition? If its more than 32Gigs, what is the procedure after?

I've been trying on and off to get bootcamp working on my mbp but it has issues I can't fix so I'm giving up with bootcamp. Is it possible for me to install windows on another partition using a program such as parallels, then natively boot up. I say this because I assume running games inside parallels would be slow. (I've tried crossover games and it is buggy with steam for me)

i am about to install windows vista via bootcamp on my new imac and i was just reading on apples install guide to only install windows 32bit... but the version i bought is 64bit cause in a previous thread i asked what u should install and someone said 64bit... is it ok to install it? what should i do... if i anyone can answer this quickly it would mean alot i want to install it asap!

I've tried three times to install Bootcamp drivers on my Windows 7 partition and all times have failed with a mini BSOD that says "A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer" a couple seconds after it's done installing the ATI drivers and it's just a green bar with no text above it. I couldn't read the rest of the BSOD because it goes away in 2 seconds. Any help/fix for this would be appreciated. I'm thinking of just reinstalling the 2.0 drivers but I really want access to my Mac side while in Windows.

Just got my copy of Windows 7 Home Premium and decided to install it via bootcamp to try out Aion! but when the mac restarts to install Windows 7 I always get the flashing _ I left for an hour or so but it stays like that! I have the full final copy of Windows 7!

I tried to install wondows xp SP3 using bootcamp on my macbook pro (new) and it goes fine up to the point of the actual installing. It goes to 28% and then freezes. I was using the FAT system with 32gb partitioned space, however I also tried it on all of the other modes but it doesn't work either and always stops at 28%.

I own an unused copy of Windows XP professional and i want to add a new partition on my Macbook Pro so i can install Windows XP on it and have OSX and Windows on one machine. But with the new version of Bootcamp that comes with OSX Lion, i cant install XP because its not supported. When i put the Windows XP Installation disc and click the 'Install" button on Bootcamp, it doesn't recognize the disc because Windows XP isn't supported on this version of Bootcamp. I am also unable to downgrade back to Snow Leopard. Is there anyway i can get Windows XP to work on my Lion based machine without downgrading my Mac OS or using a VM?

I have a 13 inch Aluminum Late 2008 MacBook. Processor 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4 (11E53). Currently I have a 160 GB SATA disk as my hard drive a d 4 GB of memory. (Is it time to upgrade or what?) I recently bought a Western Digital 1 TB internal hard drive to replace my exisiting internal hard drive. I spent a lot of time last night trying to first- connect this new hard drive to my computer so that I can then clone the existing hard drive and then hoping that I would get that done so I could install the new hard drive. No such luck.

Format: MS-DOS (FAT) --- This was the only option that I was given that I thought would work. I did not have the option of "Windows NT File System (NTFS) to choose from. Question # 1: is that going to be a problem? I only run 1 program on Windows and that is the only reason I have BOOTCAMP on there at all. However, I do HAVE to have that program. Like I said it didn't give me the option to choose Windows so I didn't know where to go with this. Any help with that would be awesome.

Size: 26.34 GB (I just used the same size that was current, or close to it.) I connected the Western Digital 1 TB through an external device, partitioned it as stated above, and then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drives. The first one went through fine. (It took 2 hours and I went to bed before it finished.) This morning I woke to see that it had gone through well. I then started the process with the BOOTCAMP drives. However, before I started it gave me errors stating that I wouldn't be able to run Windows off of the Cloned BOOTCAMP drive. Question #2: Is it because of the Format type I chose when partitioning?

I have a unibody 13" MacBook running Leopard with Bootcamp running Windows Vista. I want to try and make the move this weekend to both Snow Leopard AND Windows 7.

First, what is my best plan of attack here? Will Snow Leopard install just fine and ignore my current 25gb partition of Vista currently set up? (i.e. not effect it at all). I would assume so but I'm not totally sure.

Second, what is the best way to go about installing Windows 7? I am a university student and I will be getting the $30 upgrade version of Windows 7. I've heard that doing a clean install is the best way to go instead of going over vista, so I hear I need to make an iso out of the upgrade version and use that?

I'm planning on doing Snow Leopard first, then Windows 7 second as this seems like the most logical order for me.

I bought a new Core i5 Macbook Pro, and I want to install Windows 7 on it through Bootcamp. I have a friend that told me not to buy the Windows 7 full retail version and instead buy install the "System Builders" version of Windows 7 on my Mac, and save money. I just wanted to know if there's someone who has sucessfully installed Windows 7 OEM "System Builders" edition and if there's any technical difficulties in installing Windows 7 System Builders edition in a Mac through Bootcamp.

I recently purchased a 2010 Mac Pro 2.8 quad and installed vista 64 via boot camp. It just doesn't seem to recognize any wireless connection as if the airport card isn't even installed. I checked device manager and it shows that the network controller does not have any drivers installed. I have never had any issues connecting wireless with the 2010 mac mini or previous macs.